Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
Goddamn, if they're already splitting hairs over platforming anti-trans voices, their site really is speedrunning the downfall of Twitter.
Trust and Safety my ass. The whole reason people are there is because Twitter chose to platform nazis and became a nazi bar. You don't immediately screw this up by equivocating about personal responsibility and block tools. You ban the nazis so they don't get a foothold in the first place.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
Anyway, this and my general discomfort over running my online presence like a content mill means I'm staying with Masto for the long term, I think.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
Person on the blue site gets it: "moderation only has limits when engagement starts looking like dollar signs": https://bsky.app/profile/brentosaur.bsky.social/post/3ld7je2uhi226
So much of this is sourced from the ads industry having power, where keeping people on a single website _is_ the revenue model. It's how these sites carve out power where relevance (eg, distribution) was once the metric, and you see it everywhere now.
It also signals Bsky wants to make people the product again.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
Anyway, to kind of summarize here: I think engagement is a terrible metric.
It's central to this idea that, from a website's perspective, people are monetizable eyeballs whose only useful output is growth and, eventually, buying product (and generating derivative revenue getting there, like ads).
And I'm... sort of relieved that there are still plenty of places to go that still care about the qualities of the website and community instead.
re: Bsky discourse continued, uspol-adjacent
Postscript: an alternate hypothesis being floated for why Bsky is doing this: they're scared of the orange and X shitlords burying Bsky in expensive litigation and/or hostile government action (eg, requires login: https://bsky.app/profile/insortediaboli.bsky.social/post/3ldb23jr4vs2f ). In that scenario, they're trying to make themselves less of a target in the short term, to kick this down the road until a more favorable legal or political reality.
IMO, if Bsky or AtProto can't navigate that, they have a huge problem. And if they're afraid of a reality in which social media sites are litigated or regulated out of existence outside of sites sanctioned by rightwing billionaires, well.
One: decentralized solutions will survive. Folks will find a way to keep hosting and posting, even in a regressive and repressive US.
Two: that tells us the problem isn't engineering or Bsky, it's rightwing billionaires and their ability to buy power.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
@Goldkin It also kind of comes at zero surprise from the website that's just doing what it told people it was going to do. When websites tell you what they are, believe them, and this website told people that they would have a literal racism slider they could adjust to control how much they see among other hate speech forms.
re: Bsky discourse continued, uspol-adjacent
@Goldkin If social environments continue to let themselves be bullied by right-wingers, we are not going to be able to change the social environment at large. (Because common discourse/centrist perspective/etc will remain right-dominated.)
This seems so obvious to me and I don't get why it's so hard.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
@Goldkin also looks like a potentially funny outcome https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:lyw3m7azmqpxy5rrzapttea3/post/3ldbob6nc4k2i
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
@KayOhtie I was reading somewhere that he quickly became the highest per-user block and mute on the website.
While they should still deplatform his ass, if he's having a bad time? Good.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
@Goldkin having a bad time is funnier than being in their hate chambers exclusively. Maybe it causes a few more folks to deradicalize from hate. Maybe at least. I do agree it sucks overall though.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
@KayOhtie Not sure I personally go that far, BUT:
If one of the accidental outputs of people moving to Bsky and using these new tools is a crash course in opsec and being really cautious about who you engage with at all, and people start to learn that through the website, that would be a really useful and really funny way for folks to learn about how useful site moderation is.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
@KayOhtie Despite my being absolutely pissed at Bsky's concept of not moderating the discussion directly, their scalable mod tooling is great.
It's still not as robust as tools we used to kick around on ye olde forum days -- ie, moderation lists are really just RBLs/DNSBLs in fancy clothes, and we had tools that could refine from there -- but they scale a bit better and are easy for users to understand. And I like that a lot tbh.
Bsky discourse, swearing at bad mod decisions
Contrast this with some of the observations made here (and to some degree, its followup) about Google Search: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
When your goal condition isn't giving people results, it's keeping them on the website as long as possible, your incentive becomes maximizing search time and making it hard to leave. Except for ad clickstreams, of course.
This is core to why sites choose to platform bad actors. Conflict keeps people on the site.